In October 2015 Michael Stowe presented to the STC Silicon Valley chapter about spec-driven development, with a demo of RAML, which is an API specification similar to Swagger. Pretty much everyone who attended his presentation was impressed at how cool RAML is in making API documentation interactive. You can view Michael's slides and listen to the spec-driven development presentation recording here.

The following is a recording of a panel discussion at a Write the Docs San Francisco meetup held Dec 17, 2015. The topic is on creating documentation for startups.

You can watch the recording of Richard Mateosian's November 2015 presentation to the STC Silicon Valley about version control, writers, and workflows.

Spec-driven development is an approach to developing REST APIs by first describing and prototyping the API through a specification file (such as RAML or Swagger), and then coding the API. The spec not only serves as a contract for the API's development, it can also generate interaction documentation, unit tests, client SDKs, and provide other benefits.

Recently I was interviewed by Alex Bankoff from Udemy for a podcast on the field of technical writing. The Udemy team also created an infographic about the topics covered in the podcast.

In this podcast, I talk with Lisa Meloncon, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnatti, about the academic-practitioner divide.

Bob Watson recently finished a PhD with research that examined how the design and content of API reference docs affects the user's performance. In this podcast, I talk with Bob about his findings and his other research interests, primarily around goal testing to measure documentation's effectiveness.

Writing good documentation requires you to set up a test environment and test all of your instructions -- testing the instructions yourself and against a user. Testing instructions can be time consuming and tricky, especially with developer documentation. It's hard to see past personal blind spots and assumptions. But testing instructions gives you access to insight that makes your documentation much more accurate and useful.

The other week I gave a introductory presentation on API documentation to the East Bay STC chapter in Silicon Valley. Here are the slides and recording.